Lie Down in Darkness (44 page)

“Mama, I——
“

“Hush yo’ mouf! Messin’ up Peyton’s weddin’! I’ll knock you to yo’ knees directly!”

“Mama, I diden’——”

“You hush up!” she yelled, brandishing ladle and hot dogs. “Draggin’ dem weenies in here like dat. I oughta knock you in de head one!”

“Ella!” he heard Helen say, moving toward her, but it was too late: with her head buried in the folds of her apron, La Ruth had begun to cry. A great, agonized tremor of grief ran through her body; hair askew, hands over her face, she threw back her head and howled. “
Ooo-oo,
Jesus! I’nt mean to do it! Dey all got scritched up offa de table someways.” And broke down again, incoherent, and hid her face in her apron, in a new convulsion of misery. Sweating, Loftis wondered how long all this could go on; it was low comedy enacted, it seemed—because of the horror which had seized him—upon the stage of high tragedy, and the foolish guests, egging La Ruth on with snickers, were unaware of the calamitous events about to proceed from the wings.

Then Peyton darted forward. He saw it in a flash. Saw her set the glass down on the table, unsteadily—she was tight, her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright with glaze—and move toward Ella, calming her with a touch of her hand and a brief murmur. Then, lone in her command of the situation, she went up to La Ruth and put her arms about her shoulders with a little hug, saying, “That’s all right, La Ruth. Thank you for the lovely cake. Everything’s O.K., La Ruth.” It was that quick. It took no more than five seconds, but immediately the colossal awkwardness of the scene had vanished. The music began again with a soggy lurch and the air was touched with the murmur of voices, the tinkling kiss of glasses. La Ruth dried her eyes, looked up gratefully at Peyton and trudged back to the kitchen. It had been a gesture neither lofty nor patronizing, but spontaneous and unaffected, and it afflicted him with such love that he hardly knew how to bear it.
Now don’t be an ass,
his conscience said, but she seemed to be fading from him, vanishing in a powder of crushed-up dreams, and he found himself beside her, kissing her in front of everyone, much more than a father.

“Don’t smother me,” she whispered, and pushed him away angrily. “Don’t
smother
me, Daddy! You’re crazy! What will people think! Daddy, don’t!” Beads of champagne rose up between them, a green smell of grapes, and she had indeed pushed him away furiously, where he stood witless with horror and desire, his heart pounding, a smear of red grease sticky across his lips. What had he done? “Don’t smother me,” she said again in a thick voice—for she had become suddenly and astonishingly befuddled. “Damn you, Daddy! You’re spoiling everything!” And turned and weaved toward the cake with unsteady steps, the skirt about her hips shining slickly in the light. He stood shattered and bewildered in the center of the floor, thankful for the confusion which had hidden from other eyes his moment of madness. No one had noticed or heard, thank God. He turned … but yes, Harry had noticed. He caught Loftis’ eye, looked away quickly, his dark face red with embarrassment. Harry had heard and … oh, Jesus … Helen, who stood in a bright oval of sunlight, staring not at him but at Peyton’s retreating back, cruelly and with icy loathing.

Peyton and Harry had begun to carve the cake.

“Smile!”

There was a white blossom of light, cheers from the guests. The champagne hit him like a fist. Already he was hopelessly drunk. …

Six o’clock. Five minutes have passed since the first wedge was cut from the cake. There is a lull in the celebration, for it is the duty of each guest to have some of the cake, although cake goes poorly with whisky or champagne, and it is the last thing the guests want to eat. Few of them would care, really, about eating, but the guests have been to too many weddings. The cake has become symbolic of something and they have to face it: it must be eaten. Besides, it would be a pity to let that huge thing go to waste. Peyton and Harry have eaten the first slice; Ella, aided by one of the colored boys, is carving away the rest. The guests crowd around, their champagne put aside for the moment, and hold out plates. With its golden insides exposed and with white frosting crumbling softly around its edges, the cake looks like a great snow-covered mountain which has had one slope blown away by dynamite; at its peak, as if upon the top of Everest, stands a tiny bridal couple, embowered by pink sugar roses, whose faces have the serenely fatuous looks of store-window mannequins. Part of the groom has been chipped away. You can see through his morning coat to his guts, which are made, quite obviously, of nothing but candy. The bride’s bouquet has become hacked off, too. It rests far below in the gaping crevasse. And now, while Ella chops perilously about the top of the cake, the couple becomes undermined by her knife; there is a rush of avalanching crumbs, bride and bridegroom tilt, totter, lean forward as if looking for the lost bouquet, and almost fall, but are halted by Monk Yourtee who, amid rowdy, pointed laughter, snatches them from the brink and gnaws off the bridegroom’s head.

Outside, the sun sinks slowly behind a frieze of sycamores. A gentle breeze rises from the bay, filled with the faint, cool snap and odor of autumn. Leaves flutter across the lawn, troop up the slope and over the terrace and, one by one like vandals, begin to invade the room. The waiters close the doors and pull the windows down. Above the sound of music and the laughter the churchbell begins to strike six chimes, and one or two people look at their watches and decide that it’s almost time to leave. Yet no one leaves. Not yet. The cake must be eaten and then there’s space for more champagne. With cake-filled plates and reloaded glasses they scatter to the corners of the room. For a moment the conversation almost ceases. The mouths of the guests are full of cake. A brief contemplative sag has come; there’s more thought than talk, and all good Episcopalian minds turn to thoughts of things done, things left undone, words said in an alcoholic fog, not more than five minutes ago, which would have better been left unspoken. Thus chewing, briefly ruminating, they pause to sanctify Peyton’s marriage—the champagne its mystical blood, the cake its confectionery flesh.

Regard them now—Peyton and Harry, Loftis and Helen. Peyton is listening—appears to be listening—to Mrs. Overman Stubbs, who talks of her own bridal clothes, of Overman, of their honeymoon in New Orleans. Years ago …

She turns to Harry. “And your parents?” she asks, a woman with sweetness and solicitude engraved on every part of her plump and rouged, middle-aged face. Sweetness unadulterated, direct and with-

out reticence, almost obsessed in its need to be spread everywhere, it leaves an odor behind her wherever she goes, like the smell that clings to one upon leaving a bakery. She is a good woman and on this day she feels an extraordinary tenderness. She has lived most of her life in Port Warwick, and Harry is the third Jew she has ever met. He’s not strange at all, she thinks, he’s handsome, with a sad sweet look in his eyes, and impulsively she wonders about his home, his family, the mysterious New York Jews, asks again, “Your parents? They couldn’t come?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh——” Almost imperceptibly her lips quiver, she turns blindly away: there, she’s done it again. Her sweetness, her need to be nice. It so often makes her blunder. “Oh,” she says, and looks up and smiles once more at Peyton, timidly, moving aside—“Well, congratulations again!”—bogged down by a swift confusion.

Peyton drains her glass and squeezes Harry’s hand, then turns. Her face, upon which happiness has rested tangible and alive, making her eyes sparkle, suddenly and just for the briefest moment goes slack and angry, the gay façade dissolving like a film of plaster. “Let’s go soon,” she whispers. The churchbell chimes.

“What’s the matter, honey?”

“This … all this——”

“What? Take it easy on the champagne.”

“I don’t like this,” she said.

“Why, honey?”

“I—I don’t know. I—oh, Tommy!” The happy look reassembles mechanically: she smiles, throws her arms about a young naval officer, who steadies her, because she is tottering a little.

Far off to the west the last chimes waver, die, fading seaward like great globes of brass borne upon a powerful and uncanny wind. The music ceases. There is a loud, drunken shriek of female laughter, cutting through the murmurous undertow of voices, yet above both of these, laughter and voices, the bell sounds roll toward the sea, return foreshortened on vibrating blasts, fade, return, and sink finally out of the sphere of hearing.

Loftis says, “Yes, yes.” Monroe Hobbie has him clutched by the elbow, in a raw, anguished, dentist’s grip. He speaks of love, of olden times, of lost ladies and one, in particular, who left him for a dirty wop. His eyes, bifocaled, reflect sorrow, his voice the memory of a vanquished love, but Loftis doesn’t hear. Lost himself, his heart hollow as a drum, he watches Peyton through the crowd, thinking not of vanquished love, but of chimes and bells. He drinks. The bells toll on through his memory. Seaward-borne, they strike reefs of recollection, shatter and recover, come back to smother his soul like something heavy and outrageous.
Time! Time!
he thinks.
My God, has it finally come to this, do I finally know?
And lost in memory, thinking not of Peyton but of this final knowledge—this irrevocable loss of her—he recalls the incessant tolling bells. With a steady, brazen certainty they had struck off the passing hours, marched through the house night and day forever. It seems that he had heard them for the first time, though they are silent now, motionless in their yokes. The guests reel giddily before his eyes, on his arm the dentist’s clutch is raw and painful.
Those bells,
he thinks,
those bells.
Why now did they return to afflict him with such despair?
Count off twenty years.
The light in the room deepens toward gold, sending sandy threads through Peyton’s hair.

A vision swarms through his mind, as sudden and as irretrievable as smoke. It vanishes. He looks down into the dentist’s mouth, a fishlike opening, straining for breath like one who dies not for lack of oxygen, but of asphyxiation of heart and spirit, and the dentist’s eyes fill up with tears: “For a dirty little sailor she left me,” he whimpers. “Milton, man, she was the finest …”

The vision returns, and the bells. He sees the lawn outside, Peyton, summer. Peyton is a little girl with clean pink legs, a pink ribbon in her hair. Around them the grass grows thick and high and crickets jump through the spikelike weeds. Together they stand beneath the cedars, her hand in his; across the morning water flash gulls and sails, wings, waves sparkling like fire. She looks at her book, says, “Tiddely-pom,” rubs her head against his arm gently, musingly, her long, soft hair falling on his knees. The air is full of heat, insect noises, the smell of summer and now, like the stroke of a pendulum, the first voice of the bells. “Bong,” go the chimes, “bong,” says Peyton, and turns, saying, “Daddy, tell me about the bells.” He squeezes her hand, pulling her along. “Come on,” he says. They go through the weeds out into the sunlight, across the lawn and up the new-mown slope, taking care not to slip; the dew is still cold and bright on the grass. They walk in silence, for, though Peyton talks incessantly, he has forgotten the words she said. Now they are on the gravel drive, walking past the house, the mimosas, the grape arbor drowsy with bees, the honeysuckled fence, and strolling together, her hand moist in his, down the drive and up the tree-lined street. So in this way, drunk with champagne, he feels, with his mind blank to the dentist’s stricken words, blank to everything save the light woven through Peyton’s hair, immersed in time: nine times the bells are tolling, birds sing in the sycamores, and he is with Peyton, holding hands.

Across a field they go, over the ditch they jump, and over a stile. In the houses, the proper, middle-class homes with the light meters shining in the light and the garages closed and the clipped, pruned hedges—in all these houses people are sleeping, for it is Sunday; no one stirs. Peyton’s sandals flap-flap along the sidewalk, she talks of boys and cats and birds, and of bells; the chimes still ringing, a hymn now—
Jesus calls us—
they reach the church, gazing up at the ivy walls. The doors are open; they walk in, through the deserted, damp-smelling halls, past stained windows of Galilee and Capernaeum, reds like melted iron, blues the color of drowned men’s lips, past parables and saints and miracles and the diamond eyes of Peter, intercepting the morning sun like lenses of a microscope. Now up the creaking stairs they climb, brushing a dust of plaster from the walls. Peyton sneezes, the chimes grow louder above them—

O’er the tumult                     
Of our life’s wild, restless sea

—and then, emerging above in a burst of light, they stand at the belfry door, laughing together, deafened by the noise. In their arches the hammers draw back like bowstrings, leap forward, descend on the bell throats as swiftly and as wickedly as birds of prey. The timbers shudder and Peyton, frightened, clings to him. He shouts something back to soothe her but, squeezing the flesh of his leg until it hurts, she bursts out into a fury of weeping. Then suddenly there is silence, abrupt and shocking, louder than the noise: one high note quivers on the air, its vibration trailing seaward behind the deep ones, returns briefly, fades and vanishes, returns no more. Peyton continues to weep, silently, desperately, sobbing. He lifts her to the ledge and puts his arm about her, telling her not to be frightened. Beneath the eaves sparrows scuttle in their nests and fly off with a raucous sound. A twig falls from a sycamore. A car horn blows somewhere. He smooths dust from her skirt, saying, “Peyton, don’t be scared,” and then kisses her. The weeping stops. Beneath his cheek he can feel cool, tiny beads of sweat on her brow.

He doesn’t know why his heart pounds so nor, when he kisses her again, in an agony of love, why she should push him so violently away with her warm small hands. …

Now in his memory the bells fade, finally die. The dentist snuffles, lifts up his bifocals to wipe his pink, inflamed eyes. Loftis says nothing. He has heard nothing. Across the room he sees Peyton break away from the young lieutenant, her arm crooked at the elbow in a curious, disjointed way, groping behind her for the empty champagne glass. It is a willful gesture, almost frantic, and though he cannot see her face, he imagines it: tense, glowing with artificial joy, like his own a mask, concealing the bitterness of memory. He wishes to go to her side, to talk to her alone, and explain. He wants only to be able to say: forgive me, forgive all of us. Forgive your mother, too. She saw, but she just couldn’t understand. It’s my fault. Forgive me for loving you so.